Document processing is a well developed art today; for instance, witness the processing of bank checks, remittance documents and other documents of finance handled by the millions every day in banks all over the world. To handle this incredibly large volume of paper, banks rely on high speed document processors that feed thousands of documents per minute past various processing stations. [E.g. Unisys Corp. has DP1000, DP1800 and 9195 high speed document processors that handle 1000, 1800, and 2600 documents per minute, respectively.] Processing a bank document typically involves some or all of the following steps: e.g., document-feed, reading magnetic ink recognition characters (MICR), reading optical recognition characters (OCR), printing endorsements, microfilming, sorting/stacking (routing documents to pockets), and imaging (see FIG. 1A).
The imaging task typically involves: Acquisition, processing, compression, storage, transmission, display, printing, and archive of images. This invention involves producing an image platform apt for integration with a high speed sorter for acquisition, processing, and compression; with storage retrieval modules for storage and image management; with image workstations for display; image printers for print; with optical disk subsystems for archive, and with means to transmit images, point to point, and local area networks (see FIG. 1B). Mainframe computer "hosts" can link multiple imaging document processors, and associated storage retrieval modules and other peripherals to create a large scale system (e.g. see FIG. 1C).
For image-acquisition, we prefer to use a camera which provides the system with images of the front and rear of the processed documents; e.g. facsimile images which are adequate for a customer's needs.